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Restarting my career after motherhood

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Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#51
post #32
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parenthood is by far the most subsidized personal choice in the universe. Let's not pretend it's not. Some countries give more than a year paid parental leave, in what can only be described as vote purchasing. Parenthood is compensated.

It is absolutely not! We live in Germany which has good options compared to other countries and it is still not enough. My wife earns 5000€+ in her job. Guess what, you can earn a maximum of 1800€ during parental leave. It gets even better, now that she takes a few hours less because somebody needs to take care of our child, kid number 2 will even be compensated with less (1400€). How is this fair? This is without th…

in Germany the expectation is that you will inherit

if you’re not looking to inherit while you’re young, you end up in a whole different social hierarchy

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#52
post #14

I strongly disagree with "I remained flat" statement. I mean, you were taking care of your children, weren't you? If you do it right (imho, if you even just try to do it right), it's the biggest accomplishment one can do. I understand how frustrating it must be to stay professionally flat compared to your peers. We absolutely should celebrate people taking their time off to literally raise the next humans, instead we…

Parenthood is by far the most subsidized personal choice in the universe. Let's not pretend it's not. Some countries give more than a year paid parental leave, in what can only be described as vote purchasing. Parenthood is compensated.

It’s funny you say this when people heavily involved with yCombinator & capitalism argue otherwise, disagreeing with your statement.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#53
post #48
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely not! We live in Germany which has good options compared to other countries and it is still not enough. My wife earns 5000€+ in her job. Guess what, you can earn a maximum of 1800€ during parental leave. It gets even better, now that she takes a few hours less because somebody needs to take care of our child, kid number 2 will even be compensated with less (1400€). How is this fair? This is without th…

I know a bunch of women who ran a successful startup on the side of parental leave, so it can't be too bad.

[this was a joke]

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#54
> So far, I got rejected from over twenty job opportunities.

That's nothing. I've been continuously employed for over 20 years. I just got a job a few weeks ago after two months of unemployment. I kept a record of every application and in the end there were more than 130 of them. I ended up with several offers and got a great job but I had far more than 20 rejections for every offer I received and I consider that a very good result for the outcome I had and wouldn't refer to it as "a slap in the face".

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#56

Mothers returning to work should get the same ‘service’ considerations that military veterans get

Quoted post unavailable.

Whoa - posting like this will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.

I respect the family tragedy you're referring to, but it deserves better than this. The community does also. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#57
If you take N years off from a career, you should expect ahead of time to become a less compelling candidate to hire for highly skilled work. 1) your skills are assumed rustier and 2) you have fewer years left in your career so you have less room for promotion to executive levels (big companies need to be thinking about hiring their CEO 20 years from now). If you don’t want this to happen to your career, 1) get better at something that can be objectively measured or 2) don’t take N years off from your career.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#58

You might have a better chance at short term contract positions that could get a bit of recent experience, or a contract-to-hire type of position. Anyway best of luck to you. I admire your grit and determination.

Thank you so much for your advice - I am sure I will eventually find the right oportunity:) I will be exploring these options as well. they might give me the push I need for my CV to be more recent and "desirable".

Wishing you the best of luck. My wife is working through the same challenge, but has a good prospect at the moment we are hoping goes through. I’m sure if you stick with it you’ll make it, even though it’s a shame it’s this way in the first place.

Out of curiosity what kind of work do you do?

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#59

I strongly disagree with "I remained flat" statement. I mean, you were taking care of your children, weren't you? If you do it right (imho, if you even just try to do it right), it's the biggest accomplishment one can do. I understand how frustrating it must be to stay professionally flat compared to your peers. We absolutely should celebrate people taking their time off to literally raise the next humans, instead we…

It’s pretty clear that’s what the author is talking about in that sentence - I remained [professionally] flat.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#60

I remember you were making a few videos of science activities for kids. Are you still making them? I remember this about mixing hot and cold water https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGpKH0Sobcs I knew the effect before, but I thought it was not so fast.

WOW I am shocked you remember! I wrote a book in parallel to the videos for science education in kindergarten. However, after almost a year of making the videos without an income o r a significant grow in my audience, I unfortunately stopped! I loved doing them, I miss them and I am happy I tried it out but reality is, that I need a way to have an income! But I am so happy you remembered the videos + experiements. Th…

Is your CV available? (Or a short version. Do you have a High School degree? An University degree? Which area? Some work experience before the children?)

My regular advice in life is to read whatever patio11 wrote about your problem. I'm not sure what applies. Do we have a @patio11 signal?

Perhaps

* https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3170766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303181 and a few more https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

* https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/17/ramit-sethi-and-patrick... NH discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533498

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